Interview

SS: I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level. I'm sure you've had the experience of hearing some music that would be classified as avant-garde and going, "Well, that's interesting . . ."  But you don't connect with it emotionally.

DM: You're right. It is very difficult because whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge. One of the reasons why I'm working so much right now is that I'm in a place where I feel like I have a good mix of things going on.

SS: When you're working with all of these different people, do you ever find that any kind of jealousy sets in on the part of some of the people you're creatively "dating" simultaneously?

DM: [laughs] You know, I'm going to be vague about it, so it's not obvious who I'm talking about. But I have had that happen, yes.

SS: How do you deal with it?

DM: I try to deal with it by making jokes about it with the new people I'm working with so they don't get that way, too. [laughs]

SS: You've done two albums with Damon Albarn [the Gorillaz's Demon Days and The Good, the Bad, & the Queen's self-titled album]. You've now done two Gnarls Barkley records with Cee-Lo [St. Elsewhere and The Odd Couple]. Do you have any kind of rule about working with people you've worked with before?

DM: No, not really. But I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.

SS: With Gnarls Barkley in particular, what were the differences between working on the first and second records?

DM: St. Elsewhere was about three years in the making. We started on it before I had done The Grey Album, so in the beginning it was really just about me trying to get to work with Cee-Lo. He was a much bigger artist than I was at the time. We got together when we could-when he could, really.

SS: So was it different to have a schedule to work around for The Odd Couple?

DM: There was somewhat of a schedule, but it was much more about both of us thinking, Wow, when we do this next thing, a whole bunch of people are going to hear it. It was exciting in a way because we felt like we had just started to hit a groove. We spent a year on tour together, where we saw each other in a lot of different lights. It helped us to go deeper.

SS: When you're making a record, how much material do you throw away?

DM: Surprisingly, I don't throw away that much. I don't move forward with a lot of things unless they're going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you're working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff. I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you-you want them to just be themselves. Then you can edit or mess around with what they've come up with. But you have to allow the artist that space.

SS: I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.

DM: A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material-you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best. Even with artists I love, only about a third of their music is what really hits the sweet spot for me.